This time, at least, the machine test went smoothly. Hall used the touch screen to register four mock votes for an upcoming special election. The device recorded the selections onto a 128-megabyte memory chip the size of a credit card. Welch then walked the chip into a back room that stores the county’s 115-odd machines as well as its central server, which tabulates votes uploaded from the memory cards each election on a 2003 Dell desktop with a defunct floppy disk drive. The computer runs the Windows XP operating system, which Microsoft stopped supporting more than a year ago, making it vulnerable to hacks and viruses.

To date, the county has never had a major problem with the equipment, but Welch has no doubt that it’s quickly deteriorating, and she’s been pushing the county commissioners to replace it. “I've been explaining to them: It's a computer. It's all computer-based. It's 10 years old now. We've had the system for 10 full years. This is the point where things are going to start going crazy.”

In 2014, a review by Virginia’s Department of Elections of that state’s equipment, which includes the AccuVote, found that over time, a coating in the machine’s touch screen degrades a glue that holds the screen’s layers together, causing calibration errors that can prompt voters to select the wrong candidate. Welch said this problem has forced her to send a handful of the devices back to Election Systems & Software, which in 2009 purchased the original manufacturer, a subsidiary of Diebold. AccuVote is the most commonly used machine in Ohio, according to a survey conducted by the Ohio Association of Election Officials, with at least 33 counties deploying them each election.

All but four of Ohio’s 88 counties are using machines bought in 2006 or earlier, and according to the association survey, only 14 counties have a plan to replace them. The stakes are even higher in Franklin County, where 4,700 iVotronic touch-screen machines sit in a hangar-like space in the back of the Board of Elections’ sprawling offices on the north side of Columbus.. Those machines, which were first used in 2006, serve some 800,000 voters and are aging fast, but there is no plan to replace them, says William A. Anthony Jr., the county’s elections director.

A Center for Public Integrity review of Franklin County records showed that poll workers reported at least 105 incidents with voting equipment on Election Day 2014, though some of those incidents involved multiple machines. Anthony dismisses those as mostly minor problems. Still, he says he’s constantly appealing to state and federal officials, telling “anyone who will listen” about the need to replace the machines. The county does not have the money, he says, and there’s been no indication of state or federal assistance.

Despite broad concerns, the state does not collect data on the condition of Ohio’s machines writ large, and has no plan to purchase new ones.

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“If I had a computer that was that old, I would be really concerned about it,” says Thomas Hicks, vice-chair of the Election Assistance Commission, regarding the obsolete voting equipment being used throughout the nation. “That equipment is at the end of its lifecycle and it needs to be replaced,” but the federal government is unlikely to provide funding to the states. “There’s a crisis in funding it, because there’s no money available, and there’s a crisis in replacing it, because it’s so old and antiquated.”

The Election Assistance Commission has had its own problems. Before Hicks and two other commissioners were confirmed by the Senate in December, a deadlocked Congress had refused since 2011 to fill the vacant commissioner slots, leaving the body without a quorum and unable to approve new guidelines for machines. As it happened, the older guidelines in some cases precluded machines from incorporating new technologies, such as tablets, Hicks says. And while the EAC guidelines are voluntary, nearly every state requires that machines meet at least some aspect of them, so the delay effectively stalled the market because manufacturers had little incentive to develop new equipment. “These standards that we’re using now were written before the iPhone,” Hicks says.

This year, the EAC finally approved a set of guidelines that had been in the works all those years, and Hicks said they’re now planning to write new standards that will account for advancements like tablets.

States are responsible for purchasing and maintaining their own equipment, and in many cases they delegate the task to the nation’s 8,000 local jurisdictions. While there’s no good data on machine failures, incidents have been popping up all over the country. On Election Day 2014, for example, voting machines in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, started crashing and became inoperable. The state Department of Elections ordered a review that found the machines were highly vulnerable to attacks that could alter vote tallies without detection. The review determined that a hacker could access the machine, called a WinVote, using a USB port or a wireless device ( the Wi-Fi password was “abcde”). The machines’ software, a version of Windows from 2002, was easy to hack, as was its database, which was protected by a password that the reviewers cracked in 10 seconds. The Election Day problems, however, appeared to have originated when a poll worker used a smartphone to stream music through the Wi-Fi of the library where voting was taking place. The report prompted the state to decertify the machines immediately—Virginia was the only state still using them—forcing 30 localities to scramble to find replacements.

In December, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe had proposed spending $28 million on new voting equipment, but the legislature stripped the funding from the budget this year, two months before the WinVote report was published. Despite the lack of funding, all 30 jurisdictions are replacing their equipment, said Edgardo Cortes, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections, either by purchasing or leasing new systems or, in a couple of cases, receiving used machines from other localities.

Some states have upgraded their machines in recent years, including New Mexico and Maryland. But they are the exception to the rule. This year, the Arkansas legislature passed a bill authorizing $30 million to buy new machines but then failed to actually provide the money. Secretary of State Mark Martin had been pushing to replace the state’s voting equipment, going so far as to choose a vendor. But the legislature’s failure to act forced Martin to scale back the initial plan to a $2.5 million pilot project in four counties.

The Brennan Center for Justice, which works to expand access to voting and has been canvassing state officials for an upcoming report about voting equipment, found that while a “substantial majority” of states plan to replace their equipment within five years, officials in most of those states said they do not know where they’ll get the cash. “These aren’t small amounts of money,” Lawrence Norden, who is leading the Brennan Center’s work, says by email. “Given the numbers of machines that need to be replaced, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Officials and experts say the machine failures are unlikely to cause massive problems in 2016, but smaller issues can add up, leading to long lines and undermining voters’ confidence in the system.

“Election officials are doing their best to make sure that equipment functions in the way that it was designed to for 2016 and 2018,” Hicks says. “But we run the risk, as we continue to delay the replacement of this equipment, for something catastrophic to happen.”

Back in Millersburg, Welch said her county has been able to avoid catastrophe so far, in part because of her sometimes-unorthodox efforts to maintain the equipment on a shoestring budget. Back in the storage closet, after she had finished verifying the test results, Welch picked off the shelf a white plastic contraption that resembles an oversized cash register printer. The device attaches to the AccuVote and creates a paper trail of the votes, a step Ohio requires for all touch-screen machines. She pointed to a shiny steel bolt that was holding the printer’s casing together, a jury-rigged fix she devised to save money after the original part broke. “I went to the hardware store and spent maybe 35 cents and used a drill,” she says. “You’ve got to like power tools with this job.”

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While Ohio’s aging voting machines get comparatively little attention, there’s no shortage of focus on the laws and rules that end up deciding who votes, and under what conditions. It’s easy for the debates over these rules—which cover absentee voting, provisional ballots, registration guidelines and other minutiae—to get lost in a bureaucratic haze. But for Rev. Tony Minor, in what’s becoming a common refrain across the country, there’s a straight line from Selma in 1965 to the present.